Monday, August 12, 2002

Jim Henley has been challenging liberals for a while now to
acknowledge Dick Armey's late work in defense of civil liberties. For
what it's worth, I had a response up for a few hours a while back,
quoting my namesake's famous defense
of the virtues of stopped clocks, before deleting it as, well, too
snarky. But the truth is, I just didn't know what to make of it.

That contrasts with, say, my view of the generally odious Grover
Norquist's yeoman's
work towards the same end. In fact, I seem to recall last fall
that Norquist was publicly frustrated at the diffidence of Democratic
civil libertarians a while back, stopping barely short of calling them
cowards.

The interesting question here, is what are these people thinking?
Not the Democrats. That's easy; they're thinking that there are no
campaign donations in defense of unpopular principles --- the same
sort of thinking that led to solid, bipartisan support for the
Communications Decency Act, Sen. James Exon's attempt to impose a
G-rated, "safe" internet on the public, which was nearly laughed out
of the Supreme Court. But rather, Norquist and Armey.

First, Norquist. Welcome as Norquist's help may be, it's still a
bit disturbing to note how much Norquist's sudden sensitivity towards
civil rights in the wake of September 11 has to do with the strange
new friends he's been making in the radical Islamic community,
with the apparent long-term goal of building some kind of alliance
between wild-eyed Muslim fundamentalists and their wild-eyed Christian
counterparts. Norquist, in fact, had built a
coalition involving Arab-Americans and his more usual conservative
forces in opposition to the more extreme provisions Clinton-era
anti-terrorist legislation.

Which brings us back to Armey, the novel exception to my rule that
politicians don't vote on principle when they can't find some boodle
in it. It turns out that he's announced his retirement, which means
that he suddenly has a lot less need for campaign donations, or
patronage in any form. And that, in turn, has led him in all
sorts of strange directions, like this:

In a vivid sign of waning support for the economic embargo
on Cuba, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Flower Mound, said he
believes the United States should open trade with the Communist
regime. He added that he has backed the restrictions on travel and
trade only out of loyalty to two Cuban-American members of the
House.

Having decided to leave office, he finally feels free to let go the
pandering, and speak his mind. But if he couldn't before, why was the
office worth having in the first place?

Which returns me to another mystery, one I mentioned
last week. Many libertarians vote Republican under the mistaken
belief that the party stands for reducing the size of government, and
government power. Republicans talk like that, but they now have a
twenty-year record that says
otherwise --- while they cut taxes, they don't cut spending. Instead,
they just steer it to their own districts. "To the victor go the
spoils", says the libertarians' friend, Dick Armey. And before that,
we have the Nixon administration, and its mandatory wage and price
controls (and its enemies lists and other assaults on civil
liberties).

A politician with a real record of reducing the size of government
is a rare thing in either party. But we had one running for president
in the last election --- Al Gore, the point man for the Clinton
administration's cost reductions, which led to the first federal
budget surpluses in decades. Why were so many libertarians voting for
the other guy?

(For those who tuned in late, the usual Republican
response to those embarrassing Reagan deficits is to try to blame them
on the Democrats in Congress. That's a
lie. If Congress had passed Reagan's proposed budgets unaltered,
the deficits would have differed from their actual values by well
under one percent).